Gabriella Evans’s life exists in terms of logic and definitions. She’s holed up in Portland, Maine, for the summer to work on her PhD thesis, but something is screwing up her concentration: the rumble of a motorcycle every time the embodiment of her rough-and-tumble fantasies rides down her street.

When her best friend talks her into a blind date, she finds herself out with the opposite of her fantasy. He’s polite and well-mannered, yet something behind his crisply tailored shirt doesn’t add up—a rebellious gleam in his eye that piques her curiosity.

Orphaned at fifteen, Connor Starks has finally put the years of failing grades, breaking laws and breaking hearts behind him. The only holdover? His penchant for getting down and dirty in public places. But Gabriella makes him want to prove he’s become a better man.

Nothing intrigues Gabriella more than a problem she can’t solve. But the more Connor tries to bury his past, the more determined she is to uncover it. And what she finds makes all her trusty logic begin to fail her…

Warning: This book contains a summer romance, dirty talk, dockside kissing, motorcycles and tattoos. Features a rebellious nerdy girl with an appetite for outdoor sex and light spanking, and a bad boy who’s turned good…or at least he’s trying.

His voice was soft and low, his eyes hooded and dangerous again. The Connor she’d seen for a few moments at the café was back, and she wanted more of him. She stepped through the open gate and waited as he closed it behind them. The ramp was steep, and they walked down the length of ropes and wood to the flat of the dock. It was steady, secured in place by tall poles made of timber, moss growing where the water broke around them. The noise from town quieted and was replaced by the softly lapping shore, the creak and groan of idling boats, and the sound of their footsteps. As they neared the edge of the pier, Gabriella was intensely aware of Connor’s presence and the fact that in between the moored boats and sleeping seagulls, they were completely alone.

“I still don’t see how you can disprove duality,” he continued. “Every extreme is a variation of its dual, right? Hot and cold are opposites, but really, they’re just degrees of the same thing.”

Gabriella enjoyed his logic, even if he wasn’t understanding the whole picture. “So you’re saying that light and dark aren’t opposites. They’re just two poles of the same phenomena.”

“Exactly.”

“Good theorizing. I’m impressed.” She leaned back against one of the poles and slicked her tongue over the pool of melted ice cream in her cone. “Do you have any other examples to share with me?”

“Tons.” Connor braced an arm above her head, his body so muscled and sure and towering over hers. “Love and hate. Repulsion and attraction.”

She felt the pull between them like magnets. Like gravity. She had to know if he felt it too.

“Pleasure and pain.”

“Exactly,” he repeated softly. “I mean, how can you try to disprove something when it’s standing right there in front of you?”

She licked her ice cream again. Connor’s eyes darkened as his gaze dipped down to her mouth, his heavy stare fixed on her tongue. Gabriella broke off a piece of the sugary cone and bit down on it sharply. She heard his breath catch.

“Going for the cone already when you haven’t finished your ice cream?” he asked.

“I guess I’ve had enough.” The truth was that she was nowhere close to full, her body empty and throbbing with the need to be taken and claimed.

“Well, I finished mine, and I’m still hungry.” His mouth was inches away from hers. “Sharing is caring.”

She tilted her half-eaten cone toward his mouth. Connor leaned in, his eyes locked with hers as he slipped his tongue inside it. He probed and licked, achingly slow, his tongue sliding into the wafer funnel the way she imagined it pushing into her body. She shivered and reached back to clutch at the wood behind her with one hand, her knees starting to buckle.

“You sure you don’t want any more?” he asked.

“I might want more.” But she didn’t mean the ice cream.

“You should. It tastes really good.”

He took the cone from her hand and slowly, purposefully gathered some ice cream onto the tip of his tongue. Closing the distance between them, he bent down to brush his lips against hers. For a moment, all she felt was hot breath and cold lips, and then his kiss washed over her. Gabriella melted into the feeling, drinking the ice cream that spilled from his mouth into hers.

Connor pulled back to take a breath and threw the cone to the ground.

“You taste better.” He roughly clasped her neck, cleaving her to him for another dizzying kiss.

Rebecca Grace holds a Bachelor of Arts in English with a double concentration in Creative Writing and Literary Comparison, which seemed like a good idea at the time. After stumbling through careers in entertainment, publishing, law and teaching, she’s returned to her first love: writing. A self-admitted caffeine addict and gym rat, she currently lives in upstate New York with her husband, two parakeets, and a cat with a very unusual foot fetish.